


Likely to Be Lonely

by lucymonster



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Desperate Sex, Enemy Lovers, F/M, Forced Marriage, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-13
Packaged: 2020-07-29 22:16:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20089645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucymonster/pseuds/lucymonster
Summary: The First Order captures Rey, but Kylo Ren isn't ready to have her put to death.The way he tells it, marrying her is his only other choice.





	Likely to Be Lonely

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LearnedFoot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LearnedFoot/gifts).

> ‘The evils that now and then wring a groan from my heart – lie in [my] position – not that I am a single woman and likely to remain a single woman – but because I am a lonely woman and likely to be lonely.’
> 
> \- Charlotte Brontë

Of all the things that have gone wrong in Rey’s life, getting captured by the First Order again isn’t the worst. At a pinch she’d rank it somewhere in the ‘unpleasant ordeal’ category, more than an inconvenience but less than a disaster. She’s had enough practice escaping from their clutches. Experience says she’ll find a weapon or an unlocked shuttle or an easily Force-whammied guard somewhere in her path, and until that opportunity presents itself, there’s really nothing for it but to put her chain-bound feet up and wait.

In that respect, she seems to be taking things better than her captor.

‘It was an obvious ambush.’ Kylo glares at her through the bars of the cell he just purposefully locked her in, for all the world as though her presence inside it is a cruel imposition. ‘You couldn’t have had more time to escape if I’d sent you a save-the-date weeks in advance.’

‘If you didn’t want prisoners, you could have just not captured me.’ Rey matches his glare but without much heat. Her relationship with Kylo has covered lots of ground in its lifespan: hate, fear, hope, despair. After their last ill-fated meeting, she dropped her pack and set up camp on tired resignation. ‘Or you could set me free now. There’s still time. No one needs to know, and it’ll save you some face when I eventually escape.’

Kylo curls his lip at her and walks away. Moments later, he’s replaced by two stormtroopers carrying stun sticks.

She knows why he’s so angry. Here’s the thing: Kylo has a war to win, and a stolen leadership rank to cling to, and a dark religious fanaticism to keep up as protection against the ravages of his long-suppressed conscience. He has to want the Resistance dead. He has to take every chance to hurt them. But he doesn’t actually want to kill _ her. _

You’d think, given their fortuitous overlap of interests, they could work something out. Knowing Kylo like Rey does, you’d be wrong.

* * *

‘You’re going to be my wife,’ he tells her, once they’ve moved her from his shuttle to the brig of his imposing flagship.

‘I bloody well am not.’

‘Yes, you are.’ He gives her a look full of scorn and distaste, like a wealthy lord forced to scrape shit from his own shoe in the temporary absence of servants. It’s a look that reminds Rey of Leia, though Leia uses it more judiciously than her son – and more convincingly. ‘I asked you to join me once, and you refused. Now you’re my war prize. I’m not going to waste you on public execution.’

‘Your generals are putting their foot down, aren’t they? You can’t back out of killing me without losing face. I did say you should have just let me go.’

‘The ceremony will be broadcast to the galaxy,’ says Kylo. ‘A clear message to our enemies: the war is over, the Resistance is no more, and the last surviving champion of light has finally knelt to the power of the dark side. Now put on the dress.’

She’s right, then. Kylo is once again caught in a trap of his own making, and once again, it’s everyone else who has to bear the consequences. ‘You know this is going to backfire horribly when I escape.’

‘Just put on the dress, Rey.’

She casts another look at the pile of black fabric on the cell floor beside her. It comes in several layers, with hidden clasps and elaborate ruffles and a cape that weighs almost as much as she does. ‘I honestly don’t know where to start.’

‘I can help.’

‘I’d prefer you didn’t.’

With gritted teeth, he ends up summoning a tailor droid and leaving her in privacy. When he comes back to retrieve her, fully dressed, for the wedding, she sees a brief flash of something misty in his eyes before he blinks it away and resumes his usual menacing blankness. 

* * *

Her hypothetical wedding night is discussed in crude insinuations by the groom’s elite army of uniformed guests. There are comments that don’t bear repeating and pointed looks that don’t bear acknowledging.

Her actual wedding night unfolds alone in a sparsely furnished suite with a cold meal on the table and a cold armed guard at her door. She sleeps fitfully in a cold bed, thinking about air-vent escapes and makeshift weapons and what her poor friends must have thought when they saw the broadcast of her standing with bowed head at Kylo Ren’s side.

* * *

‘There are whispers,’ Rey’s lawfully wedded husband tells her over dinner one evening, after several days of solitary confinement so dreary that she’s almost – _ almost _– glad to see him. ‘About the state of our marriage. They’re saying…’ He swallows, and Rey detects just the faintest flush on his cheeks. ‘They’re saying I don’t seem to be enjoying my prize. They’re suspicious of my motives toward you.’

‘Is that why you're eating dinner in my suite?’ Rey asks.

‘This is my suite,’ says Kylo. Rey looks around at the grim bare walls and utilitarian fit-out and thinks: of course it is. ‘I’ve been giving you spa– I mean, I had other business to attend to these last few days. But if I’m not seen coming and going, they’ll start to think–’

‘They’ll start to think you’re not keeping me as a glorified sex slave after all,’ Rey finishes for him. ‘Which would be terrible for your reputation.’

Kylo gives her another one of his disgusted looks. ‘I’m saving your life, you know.’

‘No, you’re not. You’re imprisoning me under threat of death and then refusing to follow through.’ She’s long since learned her lesson about getting excited when Kylo clears a low bar of basic decency. It won’t stop him from baulking at the next minutely higher one. ‘If you expect me to be grateful, you’re more deluded than I thought.’ 

Kylo closes his eyes like he’s praying for patience. Who or what he prays to for such things, Rey can’t guess. The forces of darkness aren’t known for rewarding their devotees with lavish gifts of emotional stability. ‘Maybe you could try to look a bit more defeated when the guards are around.’

‘No.’

‘Why are you being like this?’

‘Because you forced me to marry you and now you’re asking me to collaborate in my own humiliation.’

He bangs his fist on the table. Cutlery rattles and the water pitcher sloshes over, and Rey holds his gaze with steadfast defiance. His eyes reflect a familiar battle between his rational intentions and his raging, churning temper, and she sees the exact moment both sides crumple under the weight of the deep inner hurt they’re trying to hold back. ‘This doesn’t have to be humiliation,’ he says at last, voice cracking. ‘I offered you a chance, Rey. I begged you to see reason. Even now, after you’ve chosen to commit to anarchy and chaos, I’m doing everything I can to spare you from harm.’

There’s a lot Rey could say to that. What she goes with is: ‘I begged you too, Ben.’

* * *

There’s a ready room attached to the suite where Kylo apparently takes many of his after-hours meetings. Rey tries everything to gain access, on the theory that she might as well be gathering intel while she bides her time for a chance to escape. She learns the faces of the high-ranking generals who traipse in and out, but not their names. She tries without avail to hear their conversations through the door. Not for Kylo’s sake – definitely not for his sake – she tries acting downcast and subdued around his visitors in the hope of making one of them take pity on her. It turns out Rey’s not a natural victim, and her acting skills leave a lot to be desired. The whispers intensify.

For better or worse, she's not the only person who's sensitive to rumour. Kylo takes to putting on a show whenever his guests are around: he calls her into the meeting room and drapes an arm around the curve of her hips while he lets everyone bother her with frivolous strategic questions they all know she won't answer. His touch radiates through the heavy layers of black dress he still insists she wear, and a strange, reluctant heat settles in her belly as she thinks about the intimate message he’s sending their audience.

On one occasion, as a group of visiting senior strategists file out of his meeting room into the hall, he waits until the door is almost closed and then pulls her close in the last few moments they can still see him do it. His hand is at her waist and the other cups her chin, and their mouths are so close that she can taste his breath.

‘Let go of me,’ she snaps once she hears the door click, and Kylo drops her like a hot coal. Blood rushes underneath her skin and she’s painfully aware of the places he touched.

When he’s not busy showing her off like a trinket for the sake of his own ever-sinking reputation, he mostly keeps his distance. He seems to genuinely think that _giving her space _will somehow make up for the fact that he's holding her against her will. In actual fact, his rare appearances are all that break up her boring days. She tells herself that’s why the feelings she left buried on Crait seem to be rearing their head again, bringing long-lost visions of the person he could be if he weren't so determined to cleave to his self-sabotaging worst.

The next time he calls her into a meeting, Rey beats him at his own game by standing behind him and resting her hands on his shoulders. She strokes his hair and traces the shell of his ear and preens, and the generals shuffle in their seats and Kylo goes so still that she thinks he might have stopped breathing.

‘That’s what you really want deep down, isn’t it?’ she taunts once they’re alone again and he’s staring at her in disbelief and anger and confusion. ‘Some doting doormat of a wife who enjoys her subjugation. Just like you want the galaxy to be grateful for your violent rampage.’

‘I’m bringing the galaxy order and stability,’ Kylo snaps. ‘And I never asked you to _ dote, _ whatever the fuck that means.’

‘Good. Because you’re insane if you think any part of me actually wants to submit to you.’

She doesn’t intend for it to escalate any further than that. Really, she doesn’t.

But Kylo reacts by pinning her against the wall, eyes blazing, and the unfortunate reality is that Rey has no choice but to fight back in kind. It all feels natural and inevitable, once she starts. They’re married. They’re enemies. The contradictions don’t really matter.

They should probably have just done this right at the beginning and gotten it over with.

She kisses her new husband because the closeness seems to get under his skin, and when he kisses back, she bites his lip and pushes so forcefully off the wall that they land on the floor with him flat on his back and her straddling his hips. She feels his hardness through his trousers, and in the mindless trance of suppressed desire finally breaking free, she grinds until he starts to tremble and go rigid beneath her.

Kylo’s excess layering situation is worse than the wardrobe he’s foisted on Rey, and it takes some ingenuity to get the necessary skin exposed. She doesn’t have patience for much more than that. He hisses when she opens his fly and grabs his cock with no particular gentleness, squeezing to watch the way his eyes roll back and his mouth falls open. After all his posturing and coercion, it’s nice to know how easily she can overpower him when she tries.

‘No one’s watching any more,’ Kylo tells her, breathless.

‘I know. I’m not doing this for anyone except myself.’

His pupils are dilated, turning his eyes to dark pools of desire and emotion. ‘For both of us,’ he says. ‘Rey – you understand now, don’t you? It was always meant to be the two of us. Just stop fighting and I’ll give you anything you want.’

‘I don’t need you to _ give _ me anything,’ Rey snaps, because she doesn't want to deal with another round of tearful pleas and mutual longing right now. ‘I only want one thing, and I’m taking it.’

She lowers herself onto his cock. Kylo makes a sound like a sob, and claws at the carpetless floor as she rides him.

It’s like a burst dam, a broken fuel pipe, a blazing combustor fire that spreads to consume the entire engine. It doesn’t stop when Rey comes on his cock, and it doesn’t stop when he follows her over the brink with a shout. They end up in bed, and the violence becomes a passion that turns giddily tender as it burns. Rey gets the rest of Kylo’s layers off and kisses him all over his body and leaves dark purple marks on his neck and chest. She comes again with his mouth between her thighs, and strokes him until hardness returns and then strokes him more until he’s overstimulated and squirming. 

She lets it all out. Instinct and experience tell her that their truces only ever last so long. For now, at least, this is probably the last chance she’ll have to make their miserable forced marriage count.

* * *

In the end, she steals the code cylinders from Kylo’s clothes while he sleeps off his post-orgasmic daze.

She never planned to use sex against him – for one thing, she'd prefer an escape story she can actually admit to her friends. But it would be stupid to turn down such an easy opportunity. So she leaves him sprawled out on the tangled sheets, face slack with satisfaction, a much nicer picture than the one he'll make when he wakes up and finds her gone. She knows him well enough that she doesn’t need to see the rest unfold. He'll rage and storm and add her betrayal to the ever-growing list of ways he believes he's been wronged. He'll find someone to take it out on, or else pour his distress into redoubled efforts at galactic tyranny, all the while blaming everything and everyone except for his own bad decisions.

It's not a happy note to leave on, but she doesn't have much choice. She did try to warn him.

She’s aching deep inside as she boards her stolen shuttle. It’s hard to tell which parts are emotional and which parts are from the sex. Maybe the difference doesn't matter.


End file.
